Tommy Peters' Bicycles

Carrying from where they had left off at Jonker Walk, Malacca (2015) Kiehl's Wall Mural has now (2019) descended upon the Silang neighbourhood. It paints over the sputum of our vibrant betel-leafers.  Art trivia is coming at you from Spitters' Paradise at Soong Kee's heritage wall in a gloriously showy mode for art critics to chime in their two cents. It embodies our diverse cultures habituating in Chinatown. The simplistic, flat, two-dimensional approach isn't without reason. It is convoluted to be sucked into a three-dimensional vortex of, say, the weed-inspired Kobra fleshed out by Eduardo, our South American cousin.  It is safe to assume the Brazilian and our brothers under the bridge are using the same bong with a different plant. Yet, they possess an eye for graffiti like no other. But then, that is what we do with the minimalist approach in Kiehl's offering. It wakes up the child in us and avoids all paths which may invoke the wrath of our local censorshi...

In Se7en, Andrew Kevin Walker elevated the thriller genre by removing the Judas character from the script. Spacey played the role of the protagonist's arresting officer, judge, and executioner for his Seven Deadly Sins, leaving Pitt and Freeman on the edge of their seats as they struggled with the moral implications of the killer's actions. Expertly dispatching Paltrow at the film's climax showcased Walker's mastery of the genre. However, when it comes to a script for Altantuyaa's Se7en, Walker faces different challenges. The story of a murdered woman with no apparent motive and two convicted killers without a clear connection to the victim is less compelling than Se7en. To make the script work, Walker must identify the Judas in the story, not the one who committed the crime but the one who orchestrated the exposure of it. The true Judas in this story is a powerful Machiavellian at the material time who subverted attempts to quash the investigation into Altantuyaa...

Cyrus & Tunku was published by Tommy Peters Bicycles on January 24, 2016 “A good design is obvious. A great design is transparent.”  The maxim holds for King Cyrus of Persia and Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia, who promoted a great design in a multicultural fabric working ‘transparently’ in the background.  In 500 B.C. King Cyrus, who wrote the first human rights charter, kept religions private and ethnicities distinct, enabling the ‘racehorse’ and ‘plough-horse’ to co-exist seamlessly. Generally, the Persians represented racehorses and Arabs, the plough-horses working in tandem to better the empire and down the pike; in modern times, they perform similar roles where the former is as an ‘entrepreneur’ and the latter a ‘consumer.’  Cyrus recognised that the pursuit of ethnic integration is the destruction of excellence, in that “for a plough-horse to keep up with a racehorse he would have to cripple the racehorse and conversely, for a racehorse to pull as much as a plou...